M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank

In which our man attains a sense of personal empowerment that Deepak Chopra just wouldn't understand.

TONY ASSENZA

May 1, 2001

BILL DELANEY

Click image for specs on M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank

BILL DELANEY

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The M1A1 Abrams main battle tank is the final vehicular response in U.S. foreign policy initiatives. When shuttle diplomacy fails and the world's buttheads tax our patience beyond the point of mere talk, the Abrams is what we send to indicate that Kofi Annan is out of the loop and now we mean business. When one of these 65-ton beasts shows up in the carport of the presidential palace, the choice is give up or get squashed.

In the food chain of terrain-gobbling tracked vehicles, the Abrams, which is built in Lima, Ohio, is the top predator, the numero uno tank. It can flatten a hundred Ford Expeditions without breaking stride and reduce enemy armor to a grimy blob in the dirt in less time than it takes you to say, "Okay, I quit." It's the ultimate off-road vehicle. And frankly, we can't resist the opportunity to test the ultimate anything. Especially if there's a 120mm cannon attached to it.

Whatever Modena is to the Ferrari and Abingdon is to worshippers of the sacred octagon, the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert is that thing to tank people. Arranging a visit to Fort Irwin for a test drive and some big-gun plinking required hardly any haggling, begging, or even a permission slip from the Secretary of Defense. I expected a lot of bureaucracy, forms in triplicate, and a background check for known Assenza subversives. What I got from Maj. Barry Johnson, the public affairs officer, was, "No problem. When would you like to come?" The whole process was as complicated as ordering a Happy Meal.

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The host unit for my two days at Fort Irwin, just north of Barstow, was the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR). It's also known as the Blackhorse Regiment, a name that dates to the days when they still rode horses and there were a lot fewer stars on our flag. The primary mission of the 11th these days is to act as the OPFOR (opposing force) for visiting armor units from all over the country--for that matter, all over the planet. At the tank firing range, Staff Sergeant Harris, a Gulf War vet, tank commander, and master gunner, was assigned to be my instructor. He took part in Stormin' Norman's Hail Mary play in the huge sweep deep into the Iraqi end zone, and spent 22 straight hours on the move looking for uniformed Iraqis to pan-fry.

We spent a few familiarization hours crawling over and through one of the half-dozen tanks that had completed gunnery qualification. The first thing that struck me about the Abrams was not how massive it is, but actually how compact it is for all the hardware it carries.

Lesson No. 1 about the Abrams is that there's no graceful way of getting in. You need to be young and limber, which is probably why 45-year-old guys aren't heavily recruited by the Army.

Lesson No. 2 is that leading-edge American tank technology has created an amazing array of equipment on which you can bang your head, shine your elbows, and scuff your shins. Dropping down into the gunner's station is like crawling inside an industrial-size clothes dryer that someone has already partly filled with the contents of a steel mill. With practice, of course, you learn all the Twyla Tharp moves necessary to avoid all the stuff that can raise a bump or remove dermal surfaces. But to the novice, it's like jumping into a wood chipper.

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Sergeant Harris was a patient instructor. He said nothing to make me feel like a dweeb as he watched me clang and bank-shot my way to the gunner's station.

Once inside, the tank is surprisingly comfortable. With the exception of the crew seat bottoms, there isn't one soft or padded surface anywhere in this machine. Automotive-style ergonomics are yet to make an appearance in tank design. But then you realize that lots of soft plastic and rich fabric is just that much more stuff that can catch fire when the penetrators start flying.

There are four crew stations in an Abrams. The driver is way up front, all by his lonesome. The gunner sits to the right of the main gun on a seat the size of a barstool. The commander is directly behind and above the gunner, with his feet practically on the gunner's shoulders. The loader is located to the left of the gun.

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When the tank is buttoned up, everyone views the world through vision ports. The commander has a series of ports built into his hatch and has almost 360-degree visibility. The driver can see for about 180 degrees. However, if you want to simulate the gunner's view through his single port, tape a shoebox to your head and cut a hole about the size of a tape cassette in the bottom. It's as panoramic as glaucoma.

Most of the time, the gunner is looking through the GPS-LOS targeting system. That's Gunner's Primary Sight-Line of Sight, which uses sophisticated optical and thermal imaging, and the gun points where that gunner is looking. This is why you see tanks in battle traveling in staggered formations with the guns pointed in every direction. The idea is to quarter the compass so nothing sneaks up and thwangs them.

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With the sun setting and my initial orientation coming to a close, we headed to the Distinguished Visitors' Quarters (DVQ). The DVQ is comparable to a budget motel. It was neat and comfortable, there was cable TV complete with an all-Fort Irwin all-the-time channel, and I didn't see any $600 toilet seats.

At 7:30 the next morning, Sergeant Harris met me at the tank simulators looking fresher than I did, even though he'd slept just five hours. The simulators are housed in structures that look like shipping containers, and they're powered by generators that are themselves roughly the size of the tank. They supply juice for the wall-to-wall computers and for the Arctic-strength climate-control system. The computers need to be kept within a narrow temperature and humidity range, roughly the climate you find in your fridge's salad crisper.

The simulator replicates the stations occupied by the gunner and commander, but you walk up to it, rather than dropping down. The gunner's basic job is to scan the world ahead through the GPS-LOS system, spot targets, and shoot them with the main gun. There's a switch that magnifies the view three times and 10 times. The gun is aimed and fired by means of control paddles that would feel familiar to any nine-year-old with a Nintendo. The manufacturer's label on the paddles said Cadillac-Gage, which made me wonder if they were available with wood-grain and a landau option.

The gunner’s station in the simulator is a bit roomier than the one in the Abrams, but it replicates all the controls and cold-sweat fear of actually fighting for your life. But unlike the real thing, if you die, you can press the reset button.

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Paddle operation is utterly simple. You scan the landscape by traversing and elevating the gun with the paddles until you find a target. This is done in 3X, which has a wider field of view than 10X. Once you acquire a target, you switch to 10X magnification. This makes the target bigger and, consequently, easier to aim at and kill. You center the reticle on the target and press the laser button and the magic happens. The fire-control computer calculates things like wind speed and direction, lead angle measurement, the bend of the gun measured by the muzzle reference system, and data from the pendulum static cant sensor in the center of the turret, and then it makes automatic adjustments to the gun barrel. The calculations take less than the proverbial blink of a dirty thought, and you're presented with the calculated range in the sight. You squeeze the triggers, the gun fires, and if you did it right--it's hard to do it wrong--the target cooks off like a sparkler. In combat conditions, the firing system has an 85-percent first-shot kill probability.

Computer tank fighting like this really isn't much different from a video game. Except, of course, that this one costs as much as a skyscraper in downtown Tokyo, and if you break it, Senate committees get together and mutter your name in disparaging tones. Nonetheless, computers are ultimately cheaper than buying a lot of $4.3 million practice tanks for the recruits to play with.

Sergeant Harris ran me through three scenarios that got progressively more difficult. In the first one, I killed everything in sight because my computer opponents were apparently simulating the reactions of overweight businessmen after a three-martini lunch. Piece of cake.

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In the second scenario, the targets weren't so inert. Some of them actually moved to evade my storm of simulated steel. To hit the movers, you laser and track by keeping the reticle on them. The fire-control computer does the rest. Some of my braver cyber opponents had the nerve to shoot back. I got most of them. The quicker ones slipped away behind hills and farmhouses. I was starting to sweat.

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In the third scenario, multiple targets, including tank-killing helicopters, started popping up and lobbing ordnance at me. And there were unexpected infantry charges. These were simulated by red dots apparently armed with antitank weapons. I had to hose them down with the 7.62mm coaxial machine gun before they killed me. The problem of staying alive became acute by the middle of scenario three. While I was busy with an enemy tank, a tank-killing helicopter popped over a ridge and killed me. By the end of this session, I was drenched, and I'd died so many times I thought I was Shirley MacLaine.

Sergeant Harris was supportive. "You did better than a lot of our recruits," he said. He was kind not to remind me that to qualify for tank duty his recruits have five more levels to survive, each tougher than the last. The next time you hear some TV military expert flap his gums about low-stress video-game wars and push-button battles, I can offer a very wet Banana Republic shirt in rebuttal. And that was just the simulator.

The next step was the real deal. We went back to the firing range. I suited up in Nomex, gloves, balaclava, and helmet with built-in headphones, and Twyla Tharp'd my way into the gunner's station. My concern at this point was to try very hard not to look like Michael Dukakis in his famous tank-commander photo op.

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Once you get used to the idea of being in a steel clothes dryer that weighs 65 tons and is draped with depleted uranium armor and is awash with 500 gallons of fuel, with high-pressure hydraulics snaking throughout and crammed full of explosives, the Abrams was fairly comfortable. Really. In fact, the ride out to our first firing station was more comfortable than the ride to the range in Major Johnson's Humvee, and with the intercom phones on, remarkably quiet. The ride motions are a gentle back-and-forth rocking, and the ride quality is amazingly well damped, almost cushiony. The springing media are torsion bars, seven per side, a system that dates back to tank designs of the 1930s. It took me all of 30 seconds to feel completely at ease.

The first order of business was firing the coaxial 7.62mm machine gun and the .50-caliber M2 commander's machine gun. The coaxial gun is mounted alongside the main gun and lives a foot away from the gunner's left ear. The gunner aims it through the same sight as that of the main gun. Sergeant Harris had me throw the weapon selector switch from main to coaxial, and I took aim on a berm about 100 yards away. On his command, we both cut loose. Through the gun sight I saw my tracers arc to the berm, kicking up satisfying sprays of dirt as the rounds hit. I traversed left and right, hosing the berm to make sure the Mojave Desert wouldn't suddenly jump up and attack us.

Then it was on to the main event--the main gun. Harris told me to look for a retired and thoroughly shot-up Sheridan tank up on a hill. With the naked eye it looked about the size of a muffin viewed across a football field. Amazing how a desert can swallow something weighing as much as a shopping mall. I found it in 3X, magnified it to 10X, and lased it. The range readout was a shade more than 1200 yards.

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The cannon rounds are stored in a magazine behind an armored sliding door. To get the rounds, the loader presses a flapper-type lever with his knee to activate the door. The loader grabbed a practice round and heaved it into the breech, a hunk of machined steel the size of a diesel V-8.

I heard "Up!" in my headphones, indicating there was a round in the chamber. Harris cleared me to shoot. I made sure the reticle was square on my target and squeezed the triggers.

I've fired big guns before, stuff like .308s, .454 Casulls, and even two memorable rounds out of a bone-crunching .600 Holland & Holland Nitro Express, the famed elephant gun of English hunters. But none of that prepared me for the almighty Richter-scale recoil of the tank's German-built 120mm smooth-bore cannon. The 65-ton Abrams literally rocked back on its torsion bars and shocks. And the view out the GPS-LOS was a hurricane of dust. I suppose I should say that it was scary, or disorienting, or at least sobering, as when they detonated the first A-bomb in New Mexico and J. Robert Oppenheimer remarked, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." But what it really was was empowering. The kind of empowering that people like New Ager Deepak Chopra will never understand. And a lot more fun than I'd ever had with pistols and rifles.

Middle-aged journalists should be greased from the waist down before trying to enter the driver’s station.

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When the dust cleared, Staff Sergeant Harris announced a hit. Through the sight I saw that the turret on the Sheridan was no longer straight. My round had knocked it right out of the turret ring, and it was sitting cockeyed. "Nice shot," I heard over the headphones. Manhood redeemed. Hippopotamic ballerina moves getting into the Abrams forgiven.

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Major Johnson had generously arranged six rounds for me to shoot, and by the sixth round I was hooked. But completely. I wanted six more, and I was ready to write a check to cover the cost. I don't know what heroin or biker meth feels like, but if it feels anything like shooting a gun as big as a utility pole accurately enough to shear the mustache off Saddam's face, I had a 120mm monkey on my back.

Although I'd like to credit my outstanding marksmanship for hitting every target I shot at, the real credit goes to the targeting system. It's one of the most sophisticated in the world, but it's also utterly simple to operate. Witness my performance. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's stupid-proof, but you'd have to be an australopithecine to fail to grasp the fundamentals and successfully put steel on target. Which makes me feel only a little better about paying too much in taxes.

Speaking of steel, the Abrams has two basic bullets in its arsenal. The primary tank killer is the APFSDS round, dubbed the "silver bullet" in the Gulf War. I shot six of these, but they were practice rounds, less powerful and cheaper, although just as accurate as the combat rounds. The other is a HEAT round.

The APFSDS stands for "armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot," also known as a long rod penetrator to its friends. This round contains no explosive. The part that hurts is shaped like a long lawn dart with built-in fins. The precise length, width, and weight of the rod is not available, but we do know it's made of either tungsten or depleted uranium. Because it contains no explosive, its killing power is entirely dependent on the kinetic energy transfer as it encounters enemy steel plate at roughly 2900 feet per second. Basically, when the long rod hits armor, it bores its way through and creates a fountain of molten metal inside the target, which immediately begins to consume everything inside--munitions, hydraulics, sack lunches, pictures of your dog, etc. If it doesn't fully penetrate, the thwang it creates is powerful enough to fragment and shatter the interior of the armor (a condition known as spall), creating the effects of a hand grenade. It would be hard to duck and dodge fast enough to avoid the little chunks of steel rocketing around the interior. Think of a frog in a blender.

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The HEAT round ("high-energy antitank") is what we think of as a conventional explosive. Due to its cone design, it concentrates all its explosive energy into an area the size of a quarter. On impact, the high-velocity cone of flame burns its way through armor and does to the squishy humans inside the hull what you would expect a welding torch to do to a game hen.

Assenza (with glasses) at the gunner’s station prior to killing his first tank under Staff Sergeant Harris’s supervision.

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How far do these APFSDS rounds travel before they lose the energy required to penetrate enemy armor? Many people would like to know. Even when offered a free subscription to C/D, no one at Fort Irwin would say exactly. All they would admit to was "far enough." During the Gulf War, the reach-out-and-touch-an-Iraqi range was far enough so that the Iraqis in their Russian armor could not touch back.

The next order of business, the actual driving of the Abrams, was almost anticlimactic. As was shooting the big gun, it's utter simplicity. There is some getting used to the recumbent driving position, but if you've ever spent time in a 65-ton Formula Ford, well, then it's very familiar.

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Steering and throttle are controlled by a motorcycle-style handlebar. Twist the right wrist, and you go. Turn the handlebar through its narrow range of travel, and you turn right and left. Braking is accomplished by a large pedal under your right foot. Forward and reverse are executed by moving a lever through a notched quadrant mounted horizontally just above the handlebars. A panel for vital functions is located to the right at about eye level. Basically, if nothing flashes red, you're in good shape.

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With Sergeant Harris in the commander's position and me in the driver's hole, I took the Abrams out on the firing range. Harris warned me to stay on the trails. I asked if that was because of danger from unexploded ordnance or something cool like that. "It's the desert tortoises," he said. "This is an endangered species habitat." Apparently, if the U.S. Army squishes a tortoise, the U.S. Department of Turtles can bring our nation's war readiness and tank training to a grinding halt.

The throttle, connected to the 1500-horsepower gas-turbine engine, is remarkably sensitive.

With a little twist, you can move off at a modest crawl without jerkiness. Crack it wide open, and it feels as though you've been rear-ended by the Rocky Mountains. Even pushing 65 tons, the 3940 pound-feet of torque will cause the tank equivalent of chirping your tires, gouging out chunks of desert.

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As you might imagine, the turning radius is, uh, generous while on the move (at a standstill, the Abrams can pivot in place). It's like steering a boat. You have to plan your moves and turn in early to compensate for drift. Sustained full throttle moves the Abrams along at a speed-governed 42 mph. And even over rough desert terrain, the ride is smooth enough to rate as comfortable. More cushy, in fact, than that of any sport-ute I've ever driven over similar terrain. And unlike an off-road truck, there's no banging and thudding of shocks, control arms, and bump stops. All you hear through the headset are a distant whine and the occasional rattle of steel treads.

Like firing the main gun, there's a tremendous sense of empowerment connected with driving this rig. You don't care what's in front of you, because you can probably squash it.

I'd heard that in combat crews have disabled the speed governors and cracked along at 60 mph. No reliable source could confirm this. Many have said that's impossible. So it's probably impossible. Or maybe not. What I can verify is that standing on the brakes from top speed will practically make the Abrams stand on its nose. Although we didn't do instrumented testing, a rough estimate of the stopping distance from 45 mph is zero feet. It feels like falling headfirst into a sinkhole.

Tank time ran out much too quickly. I was presented with a master gunner patch by Sergeant Harris. I gave my hosts C/D T-shirts. I think I got the better of the exchange.